To be truthful, I didn’t know exactly who Noel Sickles was when I spied this impressive tome produced by IDW Publishing. I was just beginning my education of the early newspaper comic legends like Alex Raymond, who created “Flash Gordon” or Milton Caniff, who penned and penciled “Steve Canyon” for 40 years. In truth, not many folks would have mentioned Sickles among the top comic artists of the time, and that’s a shame … for Noel was one of the top artists of his day, period.
Oh, it’s true that his lasting friendship with Milton Caniff would often lead to collaboration on “Steve Canyon”, and Noel would put his art to John Terry’s “Scorchy Smith” strip, but just a glance at IDW’s 394-page book shows that there was much, much more to the man than was captured during his 3-year run on Scorchy.
Don’t get me wrong, Scorchy Smith is great stuff, but you can tell by flipping through the strip that Noel was using the Scorchy almost as an exercise or artistic experiment. Some pages contain stark blacks, boldly holding the lines together; others are filled with sensitive and flowing contour lines, while many show the Zipatone texture that was the latest innovation of the day.
But it’s the first 140 pages of the book that really tell the story of what a restless, ceaselessly improving artist he was, unable to be contained by a single media for long. It’s actually strange that Sickles would be best remembered by his Scorchy strips, when the bulk of his most creative (and successful) work fell in the periods afterward.
You get the feeling that IDW knew all of that when they made this book. Every page literally drips with beautifully made and lovingly produced art. The simple economy of composition and contrast that Sickles perfected in Scorchy, he transferred into his bold military illustrations for Life magazine, and later in his stunning airforce paintings that shimmer with such pattern and color that they nearly burst off the page. Noel’s illustrations appear in such a variety of places; Life magazine, the Saturday Evening Post, and advertisements for travel, insurance, bourbon, and spark plugs; that it seems to be more than a collection of separate works, it becomes an artistic quilt that describes the nation as it passes from the 1940’s through the 1970’s.
Because of the vast and diverse body of work that Sickles had produced, it’s somewhat fitting that they overshadow his achievements with the Scorchy strip, which don’t even appear until the book is halfway over, but lovers of a good adventure yarn won’t be disappointed by reading through Scorchy’s adventures!
The character of Scorchy Smith was patterned after the young pilot, Charles Lindbergh, whose trans-Atlantic flight had stirred an interest in all things aviation. Scorchy flies to all kinds of exotic locals and gets into all sorts of trouble; fighting criminals, finding damsels and escaping death time after time. There is a similarity in the style of Sickles’ rendering of the Scorchy strip, and that of his best friend Milton Caniff, in that both represent characters in a sort of “cartoon realism” style. The facial features and general rendering of the characters are exaggerated and simplified for effect, while the backgrounds are often quite lavishly detailed, making the setting of the stories nearly a character in its own right. The compositions and motion in the panels are quite cinematographic, reflecting Sickles’ interest in movies (in particular, westerns), and the plots are enjoyable, if a bit predictable.
So, there you have it. IDW Publishing, with editing and design by Dean Mullaney; and the biographical essay by Bruce Canwell, has created a treasure that is a fitting tribute to a fantastic and little-known artist. Whether you’re seeking the adventure of a great comic strip or the adventure of a great artist’s life, “Scorchy Smith and the art of Noel Sickles” is a book that you’ll find yourself opening again and again.
– Dave Flora
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Dave Flora is the writer and artist of several comic stories such as Doc Monster, a 1950’s sci-fi story appearing at DC comics, and Ghost Zero, a supernatural pulp thriller. Dave is a freemason, a navy reservist, a church deacon, an actor and a wanna-be farmer. He is ten feet tall.
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Great review, Dave. Sickles’ art, and SCORCHY in particular, are surprisingly unfamiliar to a lot of people lookiing at comix these days. That’s a shame really, because Sickles, in my opinion, manges to quite comfortably tread the line between cartooning and illustration that is such a huge factor in comix at the moment. His work has the backbone of academic drawing in the tradition of Burne Hogarth and Hal Foster, but the expresiveness of line and mark making, as well as the playful distortion of charters, that typifies cartooning of his day.
Which leads to a good chance for me to plug Dave’s DOC MONSTER comic currently competiting over at Zuda. Retro sci-fi, a popular subgenre in comix, is often kind of stale and predictable and often given to cliche’. The trick is to make not just a mash-up of the original material, but to present it as a natural product of your own interests. Dave does that really, really well on DOC MONSTER giving something that feels not so much as a commentary or pastiche of old movies we love but more like a thing made in the midst of them. Its a great read and really deserves some attention and support.
Hey, Dave, can you provide people who might be new to Zuda with a link to how they might support the comic?
-Rob